Ewa Faryaszewska, Old Town Warsaw, August 1944, Agfacolor film, Warsaw Museum. Faryaszweska, an art student, took this color photograph shortly before her death while working to preserve cultural monuments during the Warsaw Uprising.
Is culture useful in disastrous times, or does the urgent matter of survival render cultural practices irrelevant?
This project investigates the relationship of cultural practices to episodes of disaster in the modern period.
This interdisciplinary research project investigates the relationship of cultural practices to episodes of disaster in the modern period. Cultural practices such as art-making, storytelling, memorializing, and collecting are vital fields through which communities make sense of disastrous events, register their impact, and envision recovery. However, disasters also call in to question the relevance of cultural practices to urgent matters of bare survival. While much scholarship is premised on the first claim, less work has taken up the second challenge. We ask: Is culture useful in disastrous times? If so, how and why? In what ways have cultural practices contributed to disaster? In what ways have they forestalled it? We seek to address these questions historically, assembling a group of scholars across fields working on historic episodes of cultural production in times of crisis to generate robust frameworks for articulating the significance of cultural life where it is often assumed. We also seek to understand these questions historiographically, drawing from the insights of historical narratives to develop strategies for the future of our own work as cultural historians in the face of the disasters that bear on the contemporary world. The centerpiece of this project are two workshops that take on the historical and historiographical dimensions of these questions in turn. These workshops will form the basis of a new network of cultural historians, not currently manifest as such, devoted to historically informed experimentation with how cultural history might develop as the conditions in which we do our scholarship continue to transform.
Assistant Professor of German History and the College
University of Chicago
Alice Goff is a historian of the cultural and intellectual life of modern Germany. Her research and teaching center on the history of museums, archives, material culture, and the looting of cultural property in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Her first book, The God Behind the...
Associate Professor of History
Yale University
Jennifer Allen is an associate professor of modern European history at Yale University. Her research and teaching focus on the history of modern Germany with an emphasis on cultural history, the theories and practices of memory, counterculture and grassroots activism, and environmentalism. Her...
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This interdisciplinary workshop will look at how cultural expressions have responded to catastrophic events in modern European history.
Carousel with 3 slides shown at a time. Use the Previous and Next buttons to navigate, or the slide dot buttons at the end to jump to slides.
This interdisciplinary workshop will look at how cultural expressions have responded to catastrophic events in modern European history.
